Bohemian Rhapsody On Old Hardware

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ht96HJ01SE4]

Here’s another junk music performance to add to the list. [bd594] put together this rendition of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody on assorted computing equipment. The lead piano sound is from an Atari 800XL. Lead guitar is a Texas Instruments TI-99/4a. An 8inch floppy plays bass while a HP ScanJet 3C covers the vocals. He had to dub the scanner four times to get all of the vocal parts. He wanted to use four independent scanners but the prices on eBay were forbidding. The use of oscilloscopes to show the wave forms in the video is a nice touch. Check out our post about Radiohead’s Nude for more examples of this.

[via adafruit]

Bent Festival Begins Tonight

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6Pbyg_kcEk]

The Bent festival, which begins tonight in New York City, is a celebration of DIY musical instruments. Artists from all over converge to beep, blip, and strum for your pleasure. With a heavy emphasis on hacking your own instruments, this is definitely something we’re interested in. If you’ve only heard a little bit of circuit bending and didn’t like it, you may want to give it a try anyway. The musical genres are extremely diverse, it’s not all just random noise.

Hard Drive Speaker IPod Dock

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vEEx4rfugE]

This looks like someone watched the Obsolete Technology Band, and had to have one of their own. It appears to be a dock, driving several different sizes of old hard drives. While the concept isn’t new, we thought they did a decent job of putting the whole display together. It could be fun to have that mounted on our wall, waiting for geek friends to impress.

Beat Boxxx And Speak To Me/Breathe

[vimeo=4038918]
[Steve] is in the MFA Design and Technology program at parsons, and as part of his studies, has built a couple really interesting projects. First, the Beat boxxx, as seen in the video above, is an 80’s retro looking portable beat looper. You create and loop your beats at the time of playing using simple hand gestures. The look is great, for those who enjoy cardboard and magic marker, though we think some tonal variation and possibly a wider pitch variation would really make this fun.

His second project is Speak to Me/Breathe. This project was meant to be a commentary on security in our daily information. He is visually displaying the braille symbols to spell out his emails. If any person were to spend the effort, they could decipher his emails. The finish on this project is quite nice, you can see a video of the display after the break.

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AXiS-49 Teardown

cthruteardown

We touched on harmonic table MIDI controllers when [aris] was building one. [Ken Rushton] has one of C-Thru’s commercial keypads, the AXiS-49, and disassembled the device to show how it works. A PIC18F2450 microcontroller provides the USB interface and is connected to a dsPIC33FJ128GP310 digital signal controller which decodes the keypresses. The membrane buttons are made with two concentric graphite disks that touch gold contacts. The microcontroller measures the time between the two points contacting to determine the button velocity. monome button clones also use circular contact pads, but cannot calculate velocity because they only have one element.

[via Matrixsynth]

Parts: Programmable Gain Amplifier (MCP6S26)

mcp6s26

Microchip’s MCP6S21/2/6/8 are programmable gain amplifiers that multiply an input voltage by a factor of 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 10, 16, and 32. The MCP6S22/6/8 also have selectable input channels for working with different signal sources. The multiplication factor and input channel are configured through an SPI interface. This chip is useful for multiplying a small input signal, and selecting among several analog input sources. We demonstrate the six channel MCP6S26 below.

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